Catholic School Drop Out

Okay, I wasn't exactly a "drop out" I suppose, but my primary school career at the local Catholic school was ended after the first year because, as my mom said, "my daughter won't wear a uniform."

You see the next year the school had decided that it would level the monetary playing field and stop kids from being picked on for lack of new outfits if all children wore the same clothes--and for girls that meant the usual green-blue plaid skirts with white blouses.

The outfit looked much like the one worn by the Mary Catherine Gallagher character on Saturday Night Live a few years ago by actress, Molly Shannon.

As part of a Protestant family, I can and did understand the dilemma of my parents--they had willingly sent a little whippersnapper to the best school in town but did not expect to get back a smartypants papal lover. You understand.

Perhaps my devotion to my rosary (I loved its pink beads) concerned them as well, yet I had little if any idea what a rosary was for as far as prayer was concerned...it seemed to me something that was not for me--just a pretty bauble really.

And as an artist with an eye for color, the beads enthralled even as much as the ashes the priest smudged on my forehead for Ash Wednesday freaked me out. Grown-ups didn't tend to explain much to small children back then, you see, and my older brother wiped them off when I got home from school that day. Quelle relief...I thought I had to keep them on!

Whatever my parent's reasons, I was taken out for second grade and put into my neighborhood school, then spent the entire second grade doing "busy work" until my classmates caught up. Bs at a Catholic school were like As in public school, at least in the olden days of the mid to late 50s.

You see here the 'card' my teacher, Sister Bertina, made for us to color, to which she added our first grade portraits--me with my swollen lip from a horrible biking accident a few months before. This definitely looks to me like a deer-in-headlights moment.

Fortunately my coloring skills have improved somewhat as the years have passed yet I still remember how the project inspired me with its flower petals to which Sister Bertina intended to toothbrush splatters of paint onto the image by using a wooden box with screen tacked over it.

Confession: I jumped the gun by coloring my card before she splattered it, thus earning a severe scolding--the first and only time, for I loved Sister Bertina and the spelling bees which I usually won and I always tried to do my best for her. Except when it came to drawing or coloring, it seems, for I tended not to wait for anyone's permission for those activities. Guess I still don't!

Well, there's my walk down memory lane today, spurred by finding this card made at age seven for my parents and full of fond memories of a school left behind and a teacher who set me on the path to learning so long ago.

Thanks for walking with me!